Episode Highlights

• What is the Upper Limit Problem?
• How Gay discovered the Upper Limit Problem
• How the upper limit problem works
• How to identify where our limiting beliefs are coming from and why knowing this can help us overcome our upper limit problem
• The four zones of life where we spend our time
• What is the Genius Zone?
• How to find your genius zone
• How does the Woo Woo factor play a role in the upper limit problem?

Useful Links

• Gay Hendricks’ Books

About Guest

My guest today is Gay Hendricks who has been a psychologist and leader in the fields of personal growth, relationship transformation and body mind therapies for more than 45 years. He is the author of numerous bestsellers, including The Big Leap, The Genius Zone, and Conscious Loving.

In our conversation, Gay and I discuss one of the most influential psychological concepts I’ve ever discovered. The Upper Limit Problem occurs when we unconsciously sabotage our own successes, preventing us from reaching our full potential. We dive deep into how the Upper Limit Problem works in order to better understand where it’s coming from and more importantly, how to overcome it. And I reveal how the Upper Limit Problem has been holding me back for over a year now.

Gay walks us through some of the strategies described in his book, The Big Leap Year, to break through the upper limit problem and reach an area he calls The Genius Zone where you can thrive creatively and live a more fulfilling life.

If you feel that something keeps holding you back from your own breakthrough, I highly recommend that you listen to my conversation with Gay Hendricks as well as read his books, The Genius Zone and The Big Leap Year. He offers life-altering strategies for you to end negative thinking so you can live more freely in your own genius zone.

Facebook, Connect on Twitter, Follow our guest on Instagram, Click to visit our guest’s website

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I'm here today with Gay Hendricks. And he is a psychologist and author of numerous bestsellers, including The Big Leap, The Genius Zone, and Conscious Loving just to name a very few you and your wife of 40 plus years Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, you both live in Southern California. You were the founders of the Hendricks Institute, amongst many, many other entrepreneurial endeavors. And if I name them all, you and I wouldn't have time to talk, but I will share the you have appeared on more than 500 radio and television shows including the likes of Oprah, CNN, CNBC, 48 hours. Needless to say, I have incredibly big shoes to fill and a lot of books to sell for you today. But I just want to say how grateful I am for your time and your expertise, knowing the appearances that you have done immense amounts of gratitude that you're here with me and my audience today. So thank you. My pleasure. All right. So at the risk of this going from being academic to therapy very, very quickly, I want to start by talking about some of the most fundamental concepts that you have, and kind of your two most seminal books about the big leap and the genius zone. But if this does end up turning into my own personal therapy session, have your team send me an invoice afterwards, because they can certainly go there very, very quickly. But what the what originally brought me to you, and as I had said to you offline beforehand, I wish that I knew about you 15 years ago, but I discovered you a little less than a year ago when I was working with my therapist. And I felt like I just I kept hitting this wall and the simplest version without going into details. As I feel like things are starting to move forwards, then life gets in the way. And it's like, oh, you know, this is getting in the way. And I feel like there are all these these things that keep stopping me from moving me forwards. And she said, Oh, this sounds like the upper limit problem. And I said, the who and the white now, she's like the upper limit problem. She said, just look up Gay Hendricks and get back to me, I get the book and a week later, and I said, I'm reading my life story right now. And this is almost eerie. And there's a piece that I want to pull out of this that I think is gonna really help encapsulate where this goes. So you said on page 123, where you knew that this was your zone of genius. And this is your zone of genius word for word from the book. What I most love to do is translating big important life changing concepts into simple practical things that people can use. I want to read to you what I consider my zone of genius or what I call my unique specialization, I have a slightly different framework that I've worked on for years, where I teach creatives, how to find where they can be a jack of all trades, but a master of one. And that unique specialization is basically me plagiarizing the genius zone. But having come to all those conclusions before I knew you existed. So let me read what I would consider my zone of genius. And you're gonna see why I said, gay I need to talk. Mine is I excel at distilling complex ideas into simple understand, entertaining and emotionally engaging stories. Wow, that's right. And I read yours and like gay, and I need to talk and we need to talk immediately. Because there are so many things that you do that resonate with me that both were helpful for me personally. But the work that I'm doing in building my educational business, so many similarities to the work that you're doing. So where I want to start today is with my realization and you helping the the audience understand what is the upper limit problem? And how is it that it's stopping us, which then takes us into defining what the genius zone is? Because I didn't realize how ubiquitous this term was, when people say, Oh, what's your zone of genius? What's your zone of genius? And like, what is everybody talking about? And I'm like, Oh, this is the guy that came up with both of these life changing concepts. So I just want to start by better understanding what the upper limit problem is, and how you came to discover yours and make this part of your life's work.

Gay Hendricks: Yes, well, great question, first of all, and I really am glad that we resonate together on what our life purpose is and our shared goal in life. So I discovered way back, this goes back now, probably 50 years, my first little glimmer of the upper limit problem. I didn't have a name for it at the time, but I noticed this thing that I did, which was I would have some success on something. And then I would do something to sabotage myself. Particularly. I was overweight at the time, and I went on a diet and here's the first time i i saw this upper limit problem. And I was on my diet for 30 days and I lost 35 pounds. And I was feeling like a jillion dollars and I just full of new energy. And I was walking down the street in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the year of 1969. And I look to my left, and I saw this family of four eating an ice cream sundae and an ice cream shop. And the only way I can put it back is I went into a trance, and I went in there I completely lost myself and I ordered one of these ice cream sundaes, and I ate it and for about 20 minutes as you can probably will be imagined I felt like I felt wonderful all that sugar was coursing through me. But what happened to me 20 minutes after that I was walking down the street again. And I got the worst stomachache of my life. I actually doubled over on the street and somebody said, Are you okay, sir? And but I didn't know what to call it at the time. But I later on I thought, I had this great feeling in my body. And suddenly I sabotaged it, why on earth would I do that, and it started occurring to me, that human beings, like myself, and you have an allergy to feeling good for any particular length of time. And after we've felt good for three seconds or three minutes, we then sabotage ourselves by getting guilty about it and bringing in something unpleasant into our lives. Now roll the clock forward to 1974. By then I was working on my PhD at Stanford and just about to finish my doctorate. And I had the great gift of Silicon Valley was starting all around us there at Stanford, and all the early firms, you know, that would become huge, like Hewlett Packard, they were actually started by a couple of Stanford guys in their garage, you know, and Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in their garage right there, probably a half a mile from where I lived myself, although I didn't know them at the time. So all of these executives would come over to the Stanford counseling center where I worked. And they were these brilliant people, they had these amazing new ideas and technologies and 90% of the time, I didn't even understand what they made or what they were up to in their professional lives. But here's the thing that would happen, they would have a big breakthrough at work where their boss would say, our new product is selling Great. Here's a check for $100,000 Bonus, have a great weekend. Oh, and that happened on one occasion. And what did the guy do, he went home and started the biggest argument with his wife that they'd had in 12 years of marriage. And his kids got into the act anyway, it was like the worst kind of sabotage where you go from ecstasy to agony within the space of a commute home in the afternoon. And so things like that would happen over and over again. And that's when I coined the term upper limit problem, because it's a problem that occurs because you've hit the upper limit of how much positive energy you can allow it to flow through you. And now I've been studying it for well, 74 hours, when I really began to name it. I'm now I was probably 29. At the time, when I began to catch on to this. Now I'm 79. So after 50 years of studying this problem, you know, I've spoken to audiences everywhere, from, you know, India to New Zealand, to the Bronx to Beverly Hills, it doesn't really matter where I am in the world, when I bring up the subject, everybody in the audience goes, Oh, yeah, I recognize that I do that just as, as you have. So that was a pinnacle concept that I began looking for. And I also later discovered that the same thing holds in our close personal relationship. It's not just at work. But if you're in a committed relationship, you go through these cycles of things go great and are flowing, and then boom, something happens. And, you know, like, I've worked with couples that had that happen every three or four days. And I had couples that had the Friday night fights once a week or the Sunday night fight. And I've also worked with couples that can go months at a time, but eventually something happens. That cancels out that flow of loving positive energy. And so that's what I call the upper limit problem. And I urge you, if you're on any of the social media, things like Twitter acts as it is now look up the hashtag upper limit problem, or big leap or Gay Hendricks quotes. And you'll find that all these 1000s of quotes and things about that problem, and that would be a good way to get a good immersive in that, or Facebook or Instagram or wherever you hang out social media wise.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. Well, the experience that I had that I'm sure it's similar to the 10s of hundreds of 1000s of people, if not millions that have read it is also the same as my Podcast Producer, who's on this call with us right now, where she basically reached out because she hadn't heard of it either. And she's like, this is like The Matrix, like my entire life completely make sense, and I'm sabotaging everything at every turn. I'm like, oh, you know, me too. Right? It's like all of a sudden you can see the code. You can see Do the program and you can see the scripts that are running the machine. Except you, you're the machine. And then you're like, all of this is making so much more sense to me now. Well,

Gay Hendricks: yeah, thank you for bringing that up. Because it just while you were talking, I had the memory of this moment at Stanford where I was, I had just finished up my PhD. And I had gone on to work there. I worked there for a year, replacing a professor of mine who had gone on sabbatical. So I kind of sat in his seat for a year and did his research and all that kind of stuff. So it's a great way to start my academic career. Very few people go from graduate students to stand for profit overnight, but I caught a little lucky break there. So I was on top of the world, and I came back from lunch one day, and I'd had lunch with a colleague of mine and he and I were talking excitedly about the research we were doing. And so we were having a great time and I came back to my office. And all of a sudden, I had a series of worry thoughts about my daughter, and that morning I had just driven her out to is going to be her first sleepaway camp. She went to this camp all summer and then the culmination of it, they went to a sleepaway camp for they slept overnight for two nights. So kids talked about it all summer. It's a very big deal. And so I driven her out there was about 10 miles outside of town, and I dropped her off and everything was great until I got back and had this wonderful day. So all sudden, I start worrying about Amanda and I thought, oh, boy, I bet she's out there all alone. She doesn't know any of these other kids, not realizing, of course, that she knew all these other kids. And I pictured her sitting over in the corner all alone. And so being in this trance, this upper limits trance, I picked up the phone, and I call the director of the camp who was this lovely woman. And I started I said, you know, I was just worried about Amanda. She's never been away from home before. This is her first sleep overnight. And I was worried about her being alone and lonely. And the woman said, you know, I can see her she's out in the out in the field kicking soccer balls around with the other girls. They're doing soccer practice. And she looks pretty happy to me. And then she said this really wise thing she said Dr. Hendricks, could it be that you're the one that's experiencing loneliness, and anxiety, because your daughter is away for the first time. And suddenly, it was like getting hit over the head with a slot soft sledgehammer. And here I am just finished my PhD in the counseling psychology from Stanford. And the simplest projection hadn't occurred to me. But you know, that's how it is when our own stuff is, you don't always remember that you're a Stanford PhD when you get in the middle of your stuff. So anyway, so I thanked her and I sat down. And that was a moment where I crystallized the idea, I realized, Oh, I went from feeling great to feeling miserable, by evoking some thoughts that didn't even have any reality to them. Whoosh. That was a huge moment, because I realized that if you look at your thoughts, you know, we're supposed to have 50,000 of them a day, they say, but I bet, if you looked at them closely, about 49,900 of them would be about things that you can't control, or don't even exist. You know, like I dreamed up the scenario of my daughter feeling lonely, when it was obviously something of my own that had gotten triggered. Well, that was a huge moment, because I think that was the first time I called it the upper limit problem. And I began to look at this and realize that I only can let myself feel good for a short period of time before I feel anxious or guilty about it. And then I push myself back down to a manageable place I've been before, rather than being up in the own unknown world of this new possibility. So I began to look at that all over the place with couples and executives. And the amazing thing was that I found it in some of the highest functioning people you can imagine. You know, like, if you look at some of the acknowledgement acknowledgments in my book, where I thank people like Michael Dell, or, you know, the people at Motorola or the people at Bell Labs, you know, I had the opportunity to me, Michael Dell just blew me away. I mean, a mind like that you don't come across every 100 years, you know, and so it was my honor and pleasure to work with him. I know they, they say I may have helped them out down there and everything, which is great, but I was growing at the same time just breathing the same air of a person who can put billions of dollars of value in people's accounts. And so, but even the highest functioning folks, it doesn't stop them from having upper lettuce problems. And so I have a limited theory are really wild and crazy example, I'm sitting here with a couple. And their net worth is probably in excess of a billion dollars. And yet he's picking fights with her, because she bought the $7 organic brand of peanut butter rather than the $3.99 cent brand of generic peanut butter. And the same thing he critiqued her purchase of the, you know, the expensive brand of toilet paper, his theory was that, you know, we can get 50 of those at the superstore for $1 apiece, rather than paying 799 for the super swag toilet paper. So I had him get out his calculator and figured out that he could buy a roll of toilet paper for everybody on earth. You still have some change leftover and but you know, that doesn't cognitive stuff doesn't always penetrate our emotion of scarcity. Because if a person has felt scarcity in some way, they've got a body imprint of that, that later on, you know, they can make hundreds of millions of dollars, and it doesn't budge that body imprint of scarcity. Because underneath I mean, if you look at the human brain as approximately the size of a large grapefruit, about the same, you know, they weigh about three pounds, three and a half pounds, something like that. And the part of our minds that can think the cognitive part, the cortex, is the size of the rind. But what's going on down in the juicy part of the grapefruit are things like creativity and emotion and sensation and connection and all of those things that are in the juicy part of life, not in the cognitive thinking part of life. And here's the thing, human beings are only at our highest peak, when we've got the emotional part of ourselves lined up with the thinking part of ourselves. And I would even go so further, that we need to get ourselves lined up with spirit mind that body because there's a part of us, in ourselves that hungers for connection to the cosmos and connection to a higher power. And it doesn't matter what you call it, whether you call it God or Allah or brahman or whatever. It's that part of ourselves that hungers for transcendence. And that will always be there and be hungry. So we need to address that. When we sit down with a person.

Zack Arnold: Well, what you've just done is really put me in a position of having to prove that I have the zone of genius I do, because I have about seven hours worth of conversations with what you just said that I'm now going to have to steal to distill down to about 45 minutes and vastly simplify. But I love a challenge. Here's the first thing that you said that I think it's so important for people to understand that I've realized myself going back to this idea of you being the Stanford PhD, that wasn't seeing their own behaviors or thoughts, it's really hard to read the label from inside the jar, which is why I think the work that you do is so valuable in the work that other coaches and facilitators do. Because you need that outside perspective. And I just, I've had many students that have said to me, like, why is this so easy for you? Why can't I do this for myself, it's like, that's not the way the brain is wired. And exactly what I want to add to that. So what I'm going to do is trying to distill down my understanding of the upper limit problem into my own story, and I want to see number one if you agree with it. And number two, if you can help the audience better understand how we can work with it. So I've I have felt like the story of my life encapsulated in a single image is the bucket full of crabs you know the the analogy of crabs in a bucket, right? Where you you see a crab or to train to get to the top and as soon as it gets to the top and other crab pulls it down. And that's been my story, my script my programming is that I'm always trying to get ahead and do something and something always pulls me back in like I always quote that line from from the godfather. I thought it was out and then they pulled me back in like that feels like the story of my life. When I read your book, I thought, oh my god, I'm the crab. I'm not the crab trying to crawl out. I'm also the crab that's pulling myself back in that was a huge aha moment, the so taking that and also, there's another thing that I want to point out about what you're saying about how the upper limit problem works, you've talked about how it can lead to you feeling guilty or feeling anxious. For me, I think the biggest thing, and for many others, and you can speak to this, it's not even just about, I feel guilty for the success or I feel anxious about something new or uncomfortable. I don't deserve it. Deserving is a huge part of this. So talk to me a little bit more about where these scripts these voices these limiting beliefs come from, and how we become the crab that's pulling ourselves back into the bucket.

Gay Hendricks: Great question. Also, I love that image you gave a while ago about not being able to read the label from inside the jar? Or might it be an old friend of mine now passed on Bob Proctor used to say that? Oh, sure. Unfortunately, the instructions for how to get outside the box are written on the outside of the box. I love that. Yes. Great. It speaks to how much we need a community around us and people who can give us honest feedback without us attacking them. Yes. Well, as I started looking into the upper limit problem, I got a couple of huge life changing awarenesses that changed my own life. One is that all my upper limit problems, were rooted in the emotion of fear that I was afraid of long periods of things going well, and I couldn't figure out where to go, Where would I get afraid of things like that. And so I started looking, where would I or other people get afraid of feeling good or afraid of the flow of positive energy. And I uncovered a number of limiting beliefs that many of us soak up in the act of growing up and they can get into your body when you're one or two or five or 10, it really doesn't matter. But at some point, they seep into us. And one of the biggest ones, the most fundamental one is the belief that I don't deserve the good things of life. I'm fundamentally flawed in some way. So I shouldn't even bother to try to go all the way. Because there would be no point to it. So it's, it's the most fundamental one, because, you know, even with some of my gifted billionaire clients, they will go home, after a great day when they've made an extra $500 million in the stock market and start an argument with their family. And so why would a person do something like that? Well, they're allergic to positive energy, for some reason, in that context. And so I began to look at other things, other limiting beliefs, like another one I found was, a lot of people don't believe that they have a right to shine to be in the spotlight. It's okay for other people to be in the spotlight. But I have to be back here in the shadows, I can't really play big time, I've got to be a support person. And, you know, being a support person is great, unless you're doing that to keep your own light hidden. And so what I began to discover, as I worked with these, really a lot of really gifted people was that we have this part of ourselves, and I started calling it the zone of genius, or the genius zone. We have this part of ourselves, even if we're very gifted, that we're not doing what we most love to do, and we're not doing what our unique abilities would have us be doing. So I started looking at that I started breaking life down into four zones that you spend time in, and everybody that's listening or watching this, check this out for yourself if you haven't read the book, but a lot of times you're doing stuff that you don't like that you're not particularly good at. And so whenever I read in the paper of some person that aged 60 that had a heart attack while they were out mowing their lawn, I would say oh, you know, was that person mowing with resentment. At the same time, they were mowing their lawn. And so a second zone is what I call the zone of competence that we have things that we can do, but somebody else could do them just as well. And so those two zones eat up a tremendous amount of energy for people that could be spending time in their top two zones. The third zone is the zone of excellence where you're doing things that you love, well, not so much that you love to do, but that you're good at, that you're really good at and Here's the key, you can do them better than most people. And so you may be the CEO of a company, and you're doing it all from within your excellence zone. As a matter of fact, I've made a very fine living over the years, sitting down with people who are already making a fine living, and finding out what they were blocking in themselves that kept them from living in their genius zone. Because these folks that were, you know, often worth billions of dollars, or hundreds of millions of dollars, would always feel that little ache inside, that they weren't in their genius zone. And so I really, it doesn't matter if if you're a you know, person that's working down at the carwash, or a person that owns the carwash, or a person that invests in car washes, no matter where you are along the economic cycle, we've all got things within us that are calling us that and that I call it the genius zone. It's, it's calling us and wants us in it, because it knows we're never going to be satisfied until we are. And I started listening to it when I was in my 20s. I was in my late 20s. And I'm still listening to it today. And you know, other than a few joint aches and things like that I feel wildly better and more creative in my life now than I did 50 years ago. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: it's very clear that you have a lot of energy. And it's funny, because the more that we talk, the more I totally see myself in you. And I'm like, Man, if only I could be doing the exact same podcast interview with the books behind them behind me, one of them being mine, doing this for somebody else in 40 years like that would be my zone of genius. So it's it's, the parallel is now becoming downright scary. And I'm going to share another parallel that I came to. And this is partly so that when your legal team reaches out to me for plagiarism, I have the data to show that they don't need to do so. But years ago, I think back in 2017, I had this epiphany I think was in my shower where you always have the best epiphanies on a walker in the shower. And I was trying to figure out why do people hate their jobs? Why do they hate their careers? And I've built the majority of my career in Hollywood, where there's this huge disparity between success and happiness. It's an inverse proportion where you almost see everybody the more successful the more notoriety, the more money the more awards, the more miserable they get. And I was trying to think, why is that, and I had come up with this framework that by the way, had four different steps had different names, but I think you'll see the parallels in them. Yours I think is more broader and more encompassing mine was about the the job specifically. But I'd said that somebody is working a paycheck job, where they're essentially getting paid to do something that they're not really they're not really suited to do, they're not treated well. They're, you know, exploited, they're not valued, right. So that would be similar to your zone of incompetence, then the zone of competence was, I can do a pretty good job, but I absolutely hate the work that I'm doing. I don't like the people, maybe it pays well, maybe I've you know, got really good hours, I can walk to work, but I'm still miserable doing it that would be similar to the zone of competence. The zone of excellence was I am really, really good at this. And this is my career. But it's also kind of is also consuming my soul and constantly burning me out. And then the fourth one was the dream career, which is you're doing exactly what you want to be doing using all of your skills, you're energized by your work not depleted by it, you're telling stories, you want to tell making the positive impact, and you're valued and respected. So I say all of that. So your legal team knows that I wrote that in 2017. But it's, again, the parallels are so crazy. But I just say that because this this makes so much sense to me. And what I found in my own career is when I have these simple frameworks that helps me better understand, what is it about this job or this direction of my life? What is it that's not working? What's the component? Is it the stories that I'm telling is that that I'm not using my skills? Is it that I'm undervalued? And having this framework is so important, I think for people to better understand what is or isn't working about this career path, right? Am I working in my zone of genius, versus the zone of excellence versus competence versus incompetence? And my argument, knowing my audience well, is that I think it's probably the majority of people are somewhere between competence and excellence. Everybody listening to this has some level of success and some creative industry, some are doing really, really well. Very few are in the zone of genius. And I think that's what's what's stopping them, including their upper limits.

Gay Hendricks: Yes, I very much agree. Well, I appreciate you seeing it in that way. Because it very much does resemble how I see it. As I begin to work with people on their genius zone. I often could get them interested in it for 1010 minutes at a time in the beginning, you know because I I remember walking down the hall at a big Midwestern, you know, fortune 50 company with the CEO. And I was telling him my definition of genius. I often instead of sitting in people's office, I'll say, show me around if I haven't met them, and they always love to show me around. But a lot of them are very uncomfortable sitting in their office for the first time with some executive coach that's been paid to come. Help them be do better in their lives and

Zack Arnold: tell them everything that's wrong. Here's all the things you're doing wrong. Right, exactly.

Gay Hendricks: And so, anyway, so I'm taking a walk with the CEO, and we're walking down the hall, and I'm telling him, you know, my definition of genius, is you're doing what you most love to do. And you're doing the thing that makes your biggest contribution. And he said, Oh, man, you know, a lot of times I'm doing what's probably one of my biggest contributions, but I sure as hell know that I'm not doing what I love to do all day long. And I said, Well, how? And I described like, I said, I go in my office, sometime, me Gay Hendricks, I said, I just sit down. And for 10 minutes, I sit there and I simply say, What is my true genius? Am I leaving anything out? What do I most love to do? So I take 10 minutes to just focus on my genius. And he said, Now, this is a guy that's probably at the time, worth 20 times my net worth, you know, probably. Anyway, he was 100 millionaire at least. And he tells me, and he's the CEO of the place. He says, oh, man, if I just had 10 minutes in my day to do that, my head's gonna explode at hearing that because he has everything, you know, he has the house, the wife, the cars, the dream, job, everything. So I said, Okay, you turn, we turn around, let's go back to your office and sit down. And we're going to start right now with focusing on our genius for 10 minutes. And so I showed him how to do what I call in the book, wonder questions where you go, what do I most love? So a wonder question is something you really would love the answer to, but you really don't know. So wonder, what is my true genius? Just wondering about that. So we did that for 10 minutes. Oh. He said it changed his life. And I have no doubt about it, because he learned to work in a new way. As he put it, he suddenly realized that he could steer the boat from the back of the boat, rather than upfront on the bow. It's a great image. Because if you're out there on the bow, you got a lot of excitement going. But boy, you don't get to make good long term decisions. And so it was a start for him. He started every day, from then on with that 10 minutes of genius. And what I know that what he discovered is genius is addictive. After a while you want to do more and more of it. And pretty soon he's doing more and more in his ordinary day of what he feels he's most gifted to do. And so even if you only start with 10 minutes a day, get that little wedge in the door of your genius, and you'll find that it opens up from then on organically.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I've had a very, very similar experience having gone through a lot of other personal and professional development books and products. And then when I went through your book, I literally did what you told me and said, Write this prompt and write the answer down. And I'd come to basically three conclusions. I'm very much I call myself as Jack of all trades, and that I have so many different things that I love to do. But it all comes down to that that unique specialization or the zone of genius, as you call it. But if I could choose three things that I just absolutely love to do that light me up. One of them is put me in a room for four hours uninterrupted staring at a whiteboard, absolute bliss, I have a complex problem and I need to solve it with a whiteboard and markers. I remember I spent eight years self funding self producing and directing a documentary film about the first quadriplegic to become a licensed scuba diver. And I think about those eight years and what I remember more than anything else, was the week that I sat on the floor and stared at a wall and I structured the entire film with index cards. That was my absolute bliss. So that's one of them as I want to create as much time as possible, where I have a complex problem in front of me in a whiteboard, and I get to play around and solve it. The second area is knowing that whatever problem I'm solving has a positive impact on the right people. So the second favorite moment of that eight year As I was I done a screening of this film at a film festival specifically for those either with disabilities on screen, or people with disabilities were the filmmakers behind the camera. And after I screened my film, I was mobbed by parents in tears, saying you you change my child's life. And I have a hard time even saying this. You change their mindset about what they're capable of, because they saw this film, and I can't thank you enough, because this is going to have an impact. What I did on that whiteboard led to that impact. The third thing that I've added is, I am in my zone of genius when I have very complex, compelling conversations with brilliant human beings. So right now you and I talking this is when I feel like I'm in that zone of genius, everything else, probably zone of excellence, there's a few zone of incompetence is in a few places here and there. But I'm not 100% at that zone of genius, but I've identified it and I can feel it. And like you said, it becomes an addiction, it's a drug of I just, I want to get into that creative zone or whatever it might be for somebody else. So for those that are listening, that are thinking, I'm in the zone of genius, like point zero 1% of the time, and I'm stuck in the zone of competence or incompetence. What are a few strategies beyond asking these, these wonder questions that are going to get us to a higher proportion of being in our zone of genius? Well,

Gay Hendricks: that will give me a good opportunity to plug my very latest, which is called your big leap here. And what it is, is a day book of day, one day through they it's even got 366 days being a leap here, and

Zack Arnold: putting that in the title.

Gay Hendricks: And thank you, that was a creative leap done by the universe because I sure as heck didn't think of that. Just spontaneous and organic. But when you ask me the technique question, every one of the techniques that we use is embedded into all of the 366 days, like for example, I want to just give you three examples. One is how to use wonder how to create a really good wonder question for yourself. So you have many, many examples in the book of how to do that. A second one is how to make a commitment, how to make a commitment that actually works. You know, many of us are used to making commitments, you know, we start a new diet on January 1, and that lasts until January 3, something like that, before the upper limit problem gets us. And so how to make a commitment that gets you through the upper limit problem to where you want to get to. And a third thing that is really important is you could call it authenticity, or you could call it alignment. But it's very important for human beings to get their belief systems lined up with their true capabilities. So instead of a limiting belief that says, I'm fundamentally flawed, and therefore cannot reach my dreams, to put in another one, instead of that, like putting in a new program in your computer that says, I commit to using the wholeness of myself and going all the way to my full genius. Well, that's a commitment that can change everything, because it transcends and cancels out that old limiting belief. Because to even say such a thing, you've got to develop a new limiting belief, which says, it's possible for me to access my zone of genius. And it's possible for me to express that in the world. And so throughout the book, what we do is give you a little one minute or two minute or sometimes 10. Second thing you can do during that day to move that process along. And as a result, by the end of the year, you're really a different person, because we've had the opportunity to try out of course, all these things they've been tested out. And as I say, bedroom, living room and board room tested, we've tested all of those three places. And so they work well in relationships, they work well at business, but also Zack as you probably know by now in all your listeners and viewers know human beings are only at our best when we're opening up to being our best and inspiring other people to be their best. I've felt great for the past 40 Some years once I discovered that oath of life purpose that I want to serve. Is that Every day I want to grow in my own creativity, abundance and well being, as I help other people do the same thing in their lives. So I want to make a contribution to other people, as I'm contributing to myself, I think that's life at its best. And, you know, we don't know what the full meaning of life is. But I'll put that up against any other one that anybody's ever come up with, you know, the idea of life being about expanding our genius and helping other people expand theirs, what could be better? And so once we get ourselves lined up with our true life purpose, and what we're doing in the world and make it real, you know, that's life at its best.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I've not only can I not agree more, let's just let's take the alternate argument, let's assume that you're dead wrong. It's not the meaning of life. Well, guess what, that's a pretty amazing way to live your life until you discover what the meaning of life actually is, right? The worst thing that happens is you lived in your zone of genius, and you had a really positive impact on others, you inspired them, and you help move them forwards. So to me, even if it's not supposedly the meaning of life, it's the meaning of what I think would be a good and fulfilling life. And then ultimately, we're all going to discover what that meaning is. So I couldn't agree with all of that more, I have another thing that I wanted to dig into. And this may end up being the name of a new book for you. I don't know, I know that this is an area where you have a lot of experience.

Gay Hendricks: I'm, I'm, I think I'm helping me you're done. Yeah, yes, as a matter of fact that I'm so done that I recently sold my literary catalogue, which is basically selling the rights to collect the royalties on all my books, a grand sum of money. And so I'm, I'm a former writer, at this moment, I'm writing some new poems. So that's what I'm really Oh,

Zack Arnold: I love that. So you're still you're still expressing your zone of genius in different ways. Knowing that you've, you've sold all this now, it even means more to me that you're still taking the time to be on this call today. So again, immense amount of gratitude. So to very briefly, kind of go back through some of these, the kinds of the fears that are gonna stop us, right, we have this feeling that we're fundamentally flawed, which you talked quite a bit about. There's a couple others that I want to point out this disloyalty or feeling of abandonment, there's the believing that more success becomes a bigger burden or a fear of success, which has been a constant theme of my life, which sounds absurd until you experience it and you realize it's real. And I will say that the biggest one that I personally resonated with that we probably won't get into is the crime of outshining, right having come from a very small town, very rural town as far away from Hollywood and entertainment as possible, this feeling of who am I to think that I can be a successful person in Hollywood or be a successful editor? The outshining is the one that really hit me. But there's, there's another one that I want to go into that I find really interesting. And if this were going to be a title of a book, the title would be what I call the woowoo factor, which is what if all of these things that seem to be stopping you are at least on a conscious level, seemingly completely out of your control, but they just keep happening like clockwork, where you reach a level of success, but then quote, unquote, the world is what's stopping you in the world gets in the way, and there's no way you could say you had any control over it. But there's this woowoo factor, that kind of sort of makes sense of it, but doesn't make sense of it. And I know, this is another area of expertise for yours. So how do you explain the unexplainable when these patterns keep happening, but it doesn't feel like you're a part of it?

Gay Hendricks: Well, that's exactly the problem, that you are a part of it, because we are the universe, it's not us versus the universe, like the great Frank Zappa said, in the battle between you and the universe bet on the universe. Because if you separate yourself out and said, I have nothing to do with the circumstances of my life, that's a big problem right there. Because then you're saying that I don't belong to the hole. I'm unique. I'm, I'm all alone in this universe. And that's a very lonely position to be from so check that first of all, feel unconnected from the hole. But the thing is that the upper limit problem is almost always beyond our conscious minds ability to perceive so that's the reason that wander is so important, because you wonder about the unknown. What is my what is the limiting belief that's keeping me stuck? That keeps me having these things that seem to have nothing to do with me? Oh, gosh, how much time have we got here? Let me tell you a quick story about a couple. A couple of come in. Yeah, I've only got a few more minutes but the a couple came in and they've been married for six or eight years. And this was their first big gigantic blow up. And it sort of went from zero to 60, in the sense that he decided almost overnight that he wanted a divorce based on something that she had done. And so to compress the problem, basically, she'd had a one night stand with somebody she knew a long time ago at a conference she was at. That was the actual event. And then instead of hiding that, she came back and confessed it in the marriage. And he had this gigantic blow up and said, We can't be married anymore. And so they decided to come all the way from another country, actually, to sit with Katie and me, and help try to figure out the problem before they blew up their marriage, because there was a lot of consequences to it, they, you know, had a lot of property and things like that. So it was a hassle more than ever to get rid of the structure that they were living in. And so, within a day, something emerged that neither of them had even thought about before. And it was that I asked him to reflect on why of all the things that could have happened. Why was it inevitable that this particular thing happened? That's a great wonder question. Because if you have some event come out of nowhere, you know, like in the event, she went away, she had a one night stand, and he had to blow up and they're split up. Well, if you had the Supreme Court say, okay, whose fault is that? On the surface, they might say, Oh, it's her fault. She had the affair. However, when I asked him that question, how, why was it inevitable that something like this would happen? He couldn't figure it out for a day. And then finally, on the on the second day, he had this huge revelation. He said, Oh, you know, I wonder if it has something to do with my father, and what happened with my mother? And I said, Oh, what was that? And he said, Well, when I was a year old, he said, My mother ran off with a circus performer or something, a musician or something, and left my father with a one year old child, and my three older brothers to raise and his father had never remarried. And basically, this guy had grown up with his father saying, you know, you can't trust women, they'll always cheat on you, you can never, you know, beware, he was all based on this experience of having this trauma in his own life. And so here is my client. 35 years later, suddenly, with this traumatic event, where some woman went off somewhere and did something bad, and it blew up the family. Wow. So isn't that stunning? That here, this event could be so related to something that happened almost before he could talk. And but here's the magic pay off that once he understood that and felt those feelings and let himself realize that oh, that was then. This is now. You know, I have a loving partner who feels terrible about a mistake, she made her did. And so they began to work it out. And they saw that kind of it was inevitable for both of them that they would do that particular thing. Well, long winded story. But my point is that even if you think you're the victim of something, it won't hurt you to try on taking responsibility for it for 10 seconds or a minute or two and saying, Hmm, why would it be inevitable that this sort of thing would happen to me? And it helps you take responsibility for things that you may have previously been inside the victim paradigm of? Yeah,

Zack Arnold: that's really great. And I realized we're not going to have time to dig into the answer to this. But where I want to kind of tie this up, because I know you have to run shortly, is I want to give you an example of to use your your phrasing what my Wonder question would be right now, the very, very simple version of this is that for essentially the last year and a half to two years, I've transitioned to being primary caregiver and power of attorney for both of my parents. So I'm very much in the sandwich generation where they've gotten to the point where they can't care for themselves. They're not even totally aware of that fact. But I'm sure you've heard stories like this many times. Well,

Gay Hendricks: it's my own story, and it's my wife's story. Oh, All right. So you so

Zack Arnold: you can empathize with it, you understand the challenges that come with it. So my Wonder question is, and this is not something that's happened once, it's now happened four separate times, which leads me to believe that even though it I always like to think of the separation between fault and responsibility, where whatever happened might not be my my fault, but it's my responsibility to work with it and understand it. But the Wonder question for me is, why is it that every time I get to the point where I feel like, I'm ready to move forwards, I'm back on my I'm at 100%. Let's go forwards towards this vision. I swear to God the same day, the phone rings, you need to fly home, dad's in the hospital mom's in the hospital hasn't happened once it's happened four times in the last year where within 48 hours of that moment of, I'm ready, I finally feel like I built it up. I'm back ring phone rings. That's it dropped everything and come home. That to me, I know that there's something that makes sense of it. I can't make sense of it.

Gay Hendricks: Well, so a good wonder question, too. I have some other things I want to say about that. But are good wonder question to live in with? Hmm? What is it that's trying to happen within me that I'm so afraid of? That ill health by my parents can keep me from it? What is that powerful thing that's as powerful as my feeling of love and duty and care toward my parents. Be with that one? Zack? That's a great wonder question. Because I've been with this situation many times and myself as well as other people that I work with. But here's the thing. Take everything out of your mind and body for a moment. But focus on this, let's celebrate for 10 seconds or 30 seconds or a minute, how committed you are to the well being of the people in that generation. Just take a moment. And let's celebrate that, ah, I show up. In fact, I was just writing about this week, I was just writing a poem about one of my only life regrets really is that I was not able to be by my mother's side or hold her hand as she was passing out of this life. And that was 30 years ago, but it's still I feel it. And my brother was in Maryland at the time, and I was in Colorado, and my mother was in Florida. And he and I both just been there a month before. And then she had a sudden downturn. And anyway, to set the context. Before we could get there to Florida that that day or the next day, she had already passed away and but I that image. And I so didn't want her to die alone. No, I, I mean, she was surrounded by people and everything, but I wanted her you know, because the only two things she really cared about at the end were me and my kiddo and what we were doing with our lives and that kind of thing. And so anyway, I'm I'm familiar with this issue. And the big thing that we can do that is celebrated. First of all, you know that even after 33 years now or 34 years, I still feel that commitment to my mother's well being and also just happens to be coming up on my grandmother's birthday to two amazing human beings, as well as my mother whose birthday is on the 26th of two amazing human beings that I would not be here without them literally, but also figuratively, in the sense they gave me so much, particularly my grandmother. And so, to me, we need to pause and celebrate that commitment if we feel it and focus on that, you know, rather than focus on all this other stuff about it. Ah, I see the words dad behind you. You know, let's celebrate your dad hood. And your dad heard expands into past generations because you learned your dad heard from somebody, you didn't invent it yourself. You know, you had models in one way or the other. And I know most of my a lot of my parenting comes from remembering exactly how it was done to me are doing the exact opposite. That's still a useful thing to do. And so anyway, that's a big in fact it. It extends into just about anything else that we can find for with ourselves is your very correct to take the energy off fault and put it on the celebration of responsibility. Even if you don't know why you know to save noon. I wonder why I would have manifested that right now. You know, I wonder why this would have occurred, right that and to look at it not so much as a moral failing, but kind of look at it as a physics problem. Why did on the day Oprah calls? Why did I get the flu that night? Ah, that's interesting, you know, almost like I had an allergy, you know. So actually, here's a medical tip to a health tip. I managed in 1996, I had my last cold and flu. And I started using a technique that if I felt the front edge of every one of those, I would stop and just pay attention to it. Why would I need it gets sick right now, oh, I'm tired. And I don't know how to say I just need to take a few days off, you know. So I began to identify the precursors to a cold or the flu, kind of achy joints and things like that. And so I would lay down and just process that. And it never took me more than a half an hour to kind of run the stuff through my body and get back to feeling good. So here I am. 25, or almost 30 years later, where I haven't had a cold or the flu. And so I want to just keep doing that, that I want to be sensitive enough to what my body's telling me that I can get the message of it without having to lie down and have the flu for a week or, or get sick.

Zack Arnold: Well, like I said, there are a million and a half things we could go into, I want to be very conscious of your time. But the last thing that I want to say that kind of comes back to this idea of like expanding your energy to like what's happening. And I also want to share how much I appreciate the level of vulnerability and honesty about being in a similar position and this feeling of, you know, not being there for your parents. And I what I think I'm already on the right track, I have a lot of work to do. But one of the things I'm constantly doing is I'm saying how lucky am I to be in this position? How many people never get to watch their parents grow old? And we're in repay that favor?

Gay Hendricks: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, there's a whole system of therapy and they have in Japan, that you focus on the things your parents have done for you. It's a very fascinating form of treatment, where you know, it's a actualization of some of the things we've just been talking about here. But I appreciate your commitment to doing that. And also your commitment to your genius zone that keeps you showing up and doing podcasts in light of all the other things that go on in your life, so many blessings to you on revealing more and more of your genius zone till you know, it's been 25 or 30 years now, since I committed myself to living in my genius zone 100% of my life. And yeah, so far no complaints here. 25 or 30 years later, I still feel just as committed to doing that as I did on day one.

Zack Arnold: Right? Well, according to my notes, I've got about seven hours to go. However, I know that you need to go right now. So we might have to do a part 234 and five somewhere in the distant future if I've earned that opportunity. But for now, I want to make sure that I thank you incessantly for taking the time today for sharing your expertise for being in your zone of genius. And even though you've already sold all the royalties, I still want to make sure that people can find you and your books, because this stuff changes live. So what's the best one place to send everybody? Okay,

Gay Hendricks: go to an online place, if you want to get it this minute, because you can get downloaded within a minute, go to Amazon or Barnes and noble.com. And Books a Million is another good one. Best wherever your most convenient places to get a book. And if you want the paperback, there's a good discount on them this week I saw. So they've got a little sale going I think it's usually 20 bucks. But there's, you can say four or $5 off or something like that, anyway, by a storm by up a storm load. And you don't have to be Oprah of where I went from selling 10,000 books a month to selling 10,000 an hour. But I appreciate all the assistance you and your audience could give.

Zack Arnold: Of course, well, I'll make sure that there's links in the show notes for all the books, your big leap, your genius zone, the big leap as well as a link directly to your site if people want to learn more. But again, immense gratitude gay for taking the time today to speak with me and educate my audience and even give me a little bit of my own little personal therapy which I desperately needed. So this is really meaningful to me. Thank you so much.

Gay Hendricks: Thanks Zack. Good being with you.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared by Debby Germino and published by Glen McNiel.

The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).